should i give the grateful dead a chance?

Didn't the drummer study with Stockhausen or something? How come he can't play a piss easy song like that?

xp That's when the magic happens! How do you like Royal Trux so much, but not that moment(!?)

that is actually kind of a good question...?

I think all the Trux stuff I really like (ie, from Cats and Dogs on) has a pretty shit-tight rhythm section, for one thing. And Hagerty as a guitar player just goes places that are so unpredictable, always keeps me guessing without devolving into tuneless wankery, and I appreciate that a lot. Whenever I listen to the Dead I get the sense that they're trying to do a certain thing (a folk pop song, a blues jam, a "jazz odyssey", vocal harmonies, etc.) and, unfortunately, failing. I don't get that sense from the Trux, they aren't trying to nail any particular trope, they're turning them inside out.

fwiw the one thing that I heard on St. Stephen that I thought sounded pretty good was Jerry's guitar tone.

His guitar playing is the only thing about the Grateful Dead I like.

a fair take tbh

but there's a tone to the over-chirpy deployment of the "deep folk knowledge" on aoxomoxoa that just rubs me up the wrong way. smugness? maybe that's not the word tho, maybe i'll have to listen more to pin it down…

also yes its condescension. the west coast hippie vibe was incredibly condescending

That's funny, I don't hear that presentation of "deep folk knowledge" or stuffiness, reverence, whatever... if anything, it's playful and irreverent(!)

the GD were pretty sarcastic and condescending too. some of bobby's banter on late 60s shows are downright mean. would harsh a trip man

Well, sure... "Everybody take two giant steps back, so the folks in front of the stage don't end up two-dimensional."

I don't think that comes through in the music, though

is drumming a thing you'd learn from stockhausen? he was more or less totally allergic to the notion of a good beat

the GD were pretty sarcastic and condescending too. some of bobby's banter on late 60s shows are downright mean. would harsh a trip man

so much of their banter is just smarmy. my favorite is at the end of a luminous "he was a friend of mine" here:

https://archive.org/details/gd1969-04-23.sbd.miller.88501.sbeok.flac16/gd69-04-23d1t02.flac

GD: plays first song
fan: Morning Dew!
GD: No. Fuck you. You gotta stick around to hear Morning Dew

is drumming a thing you'd learn from stockhausen? he was more or less totally allergic to the notion of a good beat

― mark s

idk can seemed to do pretty good on the drumming front

anyway i am definitely on whatever team holds that anthem of the sun and aoxamoxoa or however the fuck you spell that crap is horse puckey and that they're putting in "psychedelic" weird crap to cover up the fact that they had no fucking idea how to write or record a proper "psychedelic" song at this point (it's an open question as to whether they ever figured that out), and that whatever else you can say about the "roots" music from '70 on at least the goddamn songwriting is basically solid

there are better psychsploitation albums than "anthem of the sun"

i like "what's become of the baby" but only because nobody else does, i like henry flynt and the insurrections too and they're objectively terrible

13 posts and no one has mentioned that neither GD drummer ever studied with Stockhausen

nobody wants to fucking talk about tom constanten here, i mean really why would you

i'll talk to you about peter kaukonen all fucking day though

Ok, this kind of discussion is what originally drew me to ILM and what I still truly love. Interesting hearing the Brits constitutionally opposed to the Dead give some of it a try. (Lol to Shakey's 30 seconds.) You might be surprised how they can get their hooks in you if you give them half a chance. I've been there.

what is the narrator's opinion of the proceedings here? amused, kinda? something sleazy about it, like the closer I get the sleazier it feels, which is a weird way for a genteel folk blues song to behave, and very compelling as you keep looking at it again, like a slasher movie

JCLC starts to get at a central element of the Grateful Dead. That bemused, we're all fucked/going to die/let's have fun while we go/I got mine mentality. It pervades so much of their stuff, like Mexacali Blues and Jack Straw. Cowboy nihilism.
It has the seeds of the yuppie mentality in it. Everyone thinks the Dead are some sort of flower children. Let's just say, it wasn't the Stones that brought the Hell's Angels to Altamont.

If Americans can love The Fall, I reckon Brits can love the Dead.

Just started Peter Richardson's No Simple Highway earlier today.

A lot of you haven't listened to aoxomoxoa on nitrous, and it shows.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I haven't either.

Phil Lesh was the 'core four' band member with an interest in modern classical/electronic music, and he did study with Luciano Berio for a while. Also:

During many 1974 Grateful Dead concerts over several tours, including Europe, Ned Lagin performed a middle set of electronic music, including parts of his composition Seastones, on computer-controlled analog synthesizers with Phil Lesh on electronically processed bass. Some sets included Jerry Garcia playing guitar filtered through effects processors and Bill Kreutzmann on drums; these sets occasionally segued into the final Grateful Dead set

Garcia's first alb also has a number of 'out' electronic pieces that may well have been inspired by Stockhausen and similar. And of course he turns on Ornette's Virgin Beauty alb.

As a Britisher Deadhead I'm going to say that there are more of us than you might think - I know Biba Kopf and Edwin Pouncey are major Deadheads, the Dead always played pretty large venues when they toured the UK, and I know of at least one UK Dead outdoor celebration festival that a pal of mine goes to every year.

Just say no.
― Andrew L, Tuesday, 23 July 2002 01:00 (seventeen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

what a long strange etc

LOL

Apologies if I've mentioned my conversion point before - I went to see Television at ULU (about 14 years or so ago) and enjoyed 'the jams' much more than the songs, which got me to thinking about similar groups - and voila! The Dead. Still think that there's a strong similarity between the Verlaine/Lloyd and Garcia/Lesh/Weir interactions. And there are moments when Garcia and Richard Thompson sound very similar.

All true. Was thinking of Fairport in connection with this thread last night, now there was a band with a phenomenal rhythm section.

relistening this morning and still finding it p hard work: feels like every time there's a rhythmic turnaround (which is often) they somewhat bludge it, i really don't like the vocals or the pervasive bumptious mimsiness, and 40-plus years of reading the word aoxomoxoa with that as the cover but never trying the actual record out had unfortunately led me to anticipate some blistering mix of mex-psych and maximal peyote drift, woodstock-era santana meets castaneda meets oscar zeta acosta and um it's not that (which is perhaps not entirely their fault lol) (but is better than this even if the dream of it only exists in my stereotype-ridden head)

stockhausen and/or berio plus remotely understands syncopation (let alone clavé or bugalú or whatever) wd also be a thing i had more time for (= 70s miles so i guess already exists in the world)

ts live/dead vs live/evil

also ts live/evil vs live/evil lol i have no work excuse for listening to sabbath today but i might end up doing so anyway

The Dead shared a bill with various Electric Miles groups, and Miles speaks relatively well of them in his autobiography (at least compared to the Steve Miller group). They did get a bit fusion-y round abt their 73/74 tours tho I don't think anyone would ever mistake them for the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Kreutzmann/Hart are always more rhythmical stiff than just Kreutzmann on his own, especially in the studio.

basically my favourite garcia will always be the guitar on virgin beauty

feels like every time there's a rhythmic turnaround (which is often) they somewhat bludge it

ha yes. that malkmus is reportedly a big deadhead feels like a data point always worth remembering if trying to describe what the Dead do

live dead update: having to re-process unprejudicially a fvckton of stuff i came up as a year-zero uk punk teen summarily dispensing with (mainly lumpishly bad white versions of black music i guess)

tbf i have come to terms with some of this in UK terms (white 60s blues is a problematically interesting phenom, i am sorta kinda here for rory gallagher if not clapton lol) and possibly can for this ur-version full of unrelated stuff i bridle against for different reasons BUT

also "feedback" is no ARC-WELD :|

(white 60s blues is a problematically interesting phenom, i am sorta kinda here for rory gallagher if not clapton lol)

The minimalist/restrained school of late '60s/early '70s British blues/blues-rock is fantastic. Robin Trower > Rory Gallagher. Also, Free.

I never got why people (OK, often Brits) apparently compared (or I guess compare?) Television to the Grateful Dead. While I concede they both have guitars, beyond that I don't hear it. Fairport has a little more in common, at least on the surface, but of course the musicianship and singing in Fairport is superlative. (I don't hear any similarities between Garcia and Thompson either, for that matter.)

Robin Trower > Rory Gallagher.

love to Rory but this is the truth

Irish Tour 74 doc is on Amazon Prime right now
what a fucking cutie love Rory

I'm a Brit who will very happily f/w the Dead.

I love reading about them too, there's been some pretty good documentation over the years and I'm interested in the notion of them as music culture outliers in a lot of ways.

I realised they were kinda mean and snarky when I saw this German TV footage and in-between takes there were acting kinda douchey. Before that though, I've tended to cut them some slack because I imagine that by '70 they were bone tired of explaining their motives (or lack of perhaps) to the squarejohn US media looking to pick a fight or paint them as a threat to society and (possibly) latterly the sniffy, intellectual European arts media.

However, my love for them very definitively stops at whatever point in the 1970s the lame funkiness and envelope filter guitars start to kick in.

mark s i can relate to where you're at right now, part of getting into the dead was going through this process of trying to figure out all of the ways in which they were fucked up as a group

their ability to play in unison is laughable, none of them can particularly sing - people talk about how "trout mask replica" is a bunch of people playing entirely different songs but the dead, particularly dead jams, have a tendency to come off like that for me

and my ultimate conclusion is that the dead, pre-hiatus, were on some fundamental level a drug gang masquerading as a rock group. all of the stuff that motivates other groups seemed to be less important to them. the dead's top priorities were to get themselves really high, to get other people really high (without bothering to ask those people first), and to play music.

on some level then the dead are sui generis, even the other jam bands are basically competent at playing in unison. it's an unreplicable experiment - what happens when you keep a garage band high on the most powerful acid in the world for several years straight and tell them that whatever else happens, to keep playing?

for the record i don't think television sounds a goddamn thing like the dead, "marquee moon" is fucking through-composed as far as i can tell! miles is a much more interesting comparison... i do like to refer to the out-there parts of the '72 dead as "shitty miles davis" - they heard and were clearly inspired by miles' fusion work, but they were limited in their ability to recreate that sound so what came out was this weird but enthralling soupy mess.

for the dead as live outfit, as opposed to songs, the key years for me are first off '72 and secondly '70. '69, '77, these years are acclaimed but very little of it resonates with me personally. my favorite band member is probably lesh, i love his bass tone, but the shit people go on about with "phil bombs" annoys the fuck out of me and ned lagin is far more appealing to me in theory than in practice.

anyway, my gateway into the dead, after many, many attempts, was the dark star from 1972-05-11, though that was probably mostly because i heard it before i heard the "sunshine daydream" show.

THey retire in '74 for various reasons then reemerge over th enext couple of years. Mickey Hart rejoins on i think the 3rd night of the 1974 sets taht make up the Grateful Dead Movie. There's something like 3 main gigs in 1975 including an instrumental run through of the Blues For Allah lp they're recording in the studio at the time. & the gig launching the set complete with vocals taht was released as One From The Vault.
MIckey Hart is back asa full member in 1976 but I've heard complaints about the 2 drummer rhythm section making the rhythms drag. I think they do improve over teh year. But in 1977 they decide that adopting disco rhtythms is somehow a good idea which it really isn't. Still a lot of people see 77-78 asa bit of a peak, I don't really. tend to give up listening to them after the retirement. BUt there are some good bits over the rest of tehir career. 1980 has them back to sounding like something that has progressed linearly from the earlier pre-retirement sound. I think a lot less trippy though.
I love August 68, some bits of 69, May 70. & I'm not sure what over the next few years. Veneta and some bits of Europe in '72, not sure when in 73as long as it hasn't got horns and not sure when in 74 but there are some very good bits. & in '74 they're doing live versions of Ned Lagin's Seastones in the interim between sets.
I think Feedback was an improvisation that changed every time during the years it was a feature of most gigs.

tbf i have come to terms with some of this in UK terms (white 60s blues is a problematically interesting phenom, i am sorta kinda here for rory gallagher if not clapton lol) and possibly can for this ur-version full of unrelated stuff i bridle against for different reasons BUT

― mark s

i mean, green and kirwan's fleetwood mac, what more need be said?

and my ultimate conclusion is that the dead, pre-hiatus, were on some fundamental level a drug gang masquerading as a rock group.

this makes them sound so much cooler than i've ever been able to find them

drugs aren't cool, bg.

It makes them sound like the 13th Floor Elevators, which would be a good idea.

ward's point re television was surely less "omg they sound alike" than "omg actually in both cases the live jams are where it's at not the non-live LPs" (hence marquee moon being through-composed is not really a data point)

(viz "strong similarity between verlaine/lloyd and garcia/lesh/weir interactions" is more abt in-band telepathy and mutual response than soundalike)

(ok "moments when garcia and richard thompson sound very similar" lol ward can pick this claim up and defend it, but even so one player sounding like another doesn't at all mean the bands sound alike)

too easy to cream off the topline white uk blues voices -- the mac lads, trower -- and still consider the broader vulgar form as really not worth bothering with: but i was saying ok i turned around on this from age 17 and a year-zero dick and made my peace with the form at large, problems and all (inc.such good-not-bad half-gortten mid-level representatives as rory) (but not clapton who is never not extremely boring to me as well as being a terrible person)

i was going to inject some arcane joke abt using the phrase "cream off" there but (a) forgot and (b) fuck you

I agree the Dead are sui generis; and I certainly doubt it “helps” to come in expecting them to sound like anyone other than the Dead.

Or even expecting them to be good, imo.

KInd of interesting to listen to the progressive chinese whisper element as bands move further away from the original source material that Cream or the Yardbirds or whoever pick up on and learn from the influenced bands as the source.